Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
If we keep something like copyright I think it should hold a very short time. Five or ten years maybe.
Also as have been pointed out most authors cannot live on the income from their writing. They write because they want to write and the live on something else.
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Yes, most authors cannot live on their income, but some can, and those that can are usually the most productive authors (there are exceptions of course). In fact, it is the dream of becoming a full time author that might keep other authors writing. I agree that the current laws extend copyright to a ridiculous degree; no substantial increase in motivation is provided to an author knowing that his estate will control his works 50 or 70 years after his death. That being said, if you make it too short, no one but the very best sellers will be able to make a living off of their work. Further, publishing companies loose the incentive of cultivating new authors (since best selling new work often increases the value of the author's back list). As it is, the midlist author makes enough from his new works plus the residuals he receives from old works that he can continue his trade full time.
Now here is another thought. Lets remember that copyright protection does not simply protect the work in question, but it also gives the author the exclusive right to develop derivative products from her work. Ultimately, a 5 year copyright would give the author less incentive to develop stories and characters across multiple books. What incentive would J.K. Rowling have had to write 7 Harry Potter Novels if after book number 3, the first novel entered the public domain and 100 imitators jumped on the band wagon and wrote their own Harry Potter books (and a number did anyway in countries where Copyright is not enforced). Ultimately the impact of the whole story within the Harry Potter Series would have been minimized if the reader had read a dozen books where Harry killed Voldemort, or was killed himself or if in fact Dumbledor took out Voldemort? And of course, Harry Potter is one example, you could also look at Asimov's Foundation Series, C.S. Forrester's Hornblower Series, etc.
Now does this copyright protection need to be for life? I doubt it, but it needs to be long enough that the author has a real incentive to continue to try and build his writing career.
My personal thought on the matter is that copyright protection should extend for no more than the life of the author and probably should expire say 10 years after a book has dropped past a specific sales level (I use to think it should expire 10 years after a book was no longer in print, but print on demand and ebooks has essentially made this impractical). Derivative copyright should be extended for a longer period but again not past the life of the author. And then set a minimum of 10 years on any of these copyrights.